Self-driving cars find clearer paths in UK, Germany than US

Cars that drive themselves are finding the clearest paths to showrooms in the UK, Germany, South Korea and Singapore, where governments have enacted legislation allowing autonomous vehicles to be tested on public roads. And China is not far behind.

Those nations are outpacing the United States, where the absence of national legislation to clarify a “checkerboard of state rules” hampers the deployment of driverless cars, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) said in a report. California and Arizona lead the 50 states in allowing tests of driverless cars and host the largest fleets, according to the report released on Tuesday.

Daimler, General Motors and Tesla join technology companies Alphabet and Baidu in spending billions of dollars and filing thousands of patent applications in the quest to build cars with varying degrees of autonomy. The ultimate achievement is Level 5 autonomy, in which a car does not need a steering wheel.

Global governments want their own national champions in developing self-driving cars, but they hesitate to put them on public roads because the technologies are immature. While different cultural and political systems have contributed to the differences in legislation, Asian countries overall are very aggressive in allowing autonomous vehicles on their roads, said Alejandro Zamorano, a San Francisco-based BNEF analyst who wrote the report.

In Europe, the UK is leading in shaping a conducive environment for testing, with four cities allowing public trials. France and Israel allow tests on their public roads on a case-by-case basis. As a result, both countries are not fulfilling their potential as hosts of large carmakers and novel technology companies, according to BNEF.